“Fragile Acts is a spacewalk on the wild side. . . . He puts music to the tension between the desperate human experience and the cool removal of the cosmos. This is an exciting new voice, one we’ve been waiting for.” —Laura Kasischke

“Allan Peterson’s meditations on domestic tranquility and ecocatastrophe are so smart that they could actually make you smarter.” —Boston Review

“. . . a poet capable of changing from the personal and interior to the global and exterior in a single work, sometimes in a single line.” —Shelf Awareness

Atmosphere

When I saw the sunset all the blue
had drained out of Nevada
the slow tree with the thin years in it
an empress in vermillion chiffon
drifting down behind the Sierras
After an epiphany or scare
one feels histamine tingle skin
I remember beauty is self inflicted
On a gridded floor I watched a spider
choose a path that graphed optimism
A pale moon rose like a ghost of soap

Additional information

Weight

.4 lbs

Dimensions

6 x .5 x 9 in

Allan Peterson is author of eight previous chapbooks and five books of poems, including All the Lavish in Common (2005), winner of the Juniper Prize, and Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s, 2012), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. As a visual artist, Peterson has exhibited widely. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Florida’s Fine Arts Council. Former chair of the visual arts department at Pensacola State College, he now divides his time between Gulf Breeze, Florida, and Ashland, Oregon.

Tupelo Press is delighted to announce that Dana Levin has selected as winner of the 2018 Dorset Prize: Inventory of Doubts by Landon Godfrey From the Judge’s Citation by Dana Levin: As we endure the oppressing weight of the Anthropocene Era, its civic and ecological degradations, I found Godfrey’s often funny, sometimes dark, always surprising anthropomorphic swerves a tonic. Read more